| Whereas dance scholars frequently discuss “pedestrian movement” as uniquely democratic and bound to the achievements of Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s, this dissertation analyzes the presence of mundane body techniques in four case studies across 20th century American experimental dance. The use of mundane movement is shown to be a continuing strategy for choreographers mobilized by a political urgency whose specifics are to be conveyed via the ordinary move’s relationship to realism, kinetic memory, and language.;Chapter I: Walking examines the everyday as mimetic and bound to acting in Katherine Dunham’s Cakewalk (1942), showing how she parlayed “folk” material onstage into a multi-valent dance performance that blended popular appeal with political bite. Chapter II: Playing argues that Steve Paxton used “natural” movement in his first choreography Proxy (1960) to consider habit, discipline and tradition—the limits of agency—within dance and society. Chapter III: Working analyzes filmmaker Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) as a portrait of domestic work, at once arduous and ecstatic, that dramatizes the hidden social relations so often masked in the modern work force. Lastly, Chapter IV: Fucking looks at Bill T. Jones’ dance theater of the 1990s, a careful fusion of spoken word and danced movement, for its embrace of the ordinary as body technique, expressive short-hand and concrete political method. By opening up the mundane to a spectrum of techniques, affects and effects, this dissertation contributes to the destabilization of lingering modernist notions of “pure” dance and demonstrates the entwined formal and political concerns that characterize ordinary movement as a theatrical convention.;In their use of ordinary movement, choreographers at once theorize ordinary human movement and, as persuasively as Mauss, Freud, Marx and Foucault have—the critical theorists discussed here—point to the entwined politics of act and representation within the context of everyday life. With reference to sources from classical, postmodern and dance anthropology, this dissertation appropriates the discourse that has so deeply shaped notions of alterity across the 20th century, to offer a counter-narrative: that is, the production of mundane movement within the context of experimental dance as an alternative way of researching, representing and enacting questions about the formation of alterity and the experience of everyday life. |
